Gloria Swanson

For more than three decades, Ben Isaacs worked as a Pullman porter, one of the uniformed railway men who served first-class passengers traveling in luxurious sleeping cars — a much-coveted job for African Americans between the 1870s and late 1960s. Isaacs, a charismatic centenarian who was believed to be the oldest surviving Pullman porter, died of kidney failure Wednesday at his home in Victorville, according to his brother, Andrew Isaacs. He was 107. Andrew Isaacs said his brother, who in his later years went blind, was hospitalized on Aug. 10 and released a couple of days later. "His kidneys shut down," said Isaacs, 89, who lives in Sacramento. "In three weeks he...

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For more than three decades, Ben Isaacs worked as a Pullman porter, one of the uniformed railway men who served first-class passengers traveling in luxurious sleeping cars — a much-coveted job for African Americans between the 1870s and late 1960s. ...

LOS ANGELES — It was a dank, rain-sodden Raymond Chandler kind of morning, as if some omnipotent auteur had rung up the studio and ordered a classic film noir sky. Cumulonimbus clouds the color of a snub-nosed revolver hovered with ominous intent, and...